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   Yuan, Liang; Buzoglu Kurnaz, Leman; Tang, Chuanbing (October 2021, Nature Sustainability)
2. Biorenewable and circular polydiketoenamine plastics

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01160-2  

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3. Plastics in the Earth system

   https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb0354  

   Stubbins, Aron; Law, Kara Lavender; Muñoz, Samuel E.; Bianchi, Thomas S.; Zhu, Lixin (July 2021, Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Plastic contamination of the environment is a global problem whose magnitude justifies the consideration of plastics as emergent geomaterials with chemistries not previously seen in Earth’s history. At the elemental level, plastics are predominantly carbon. The comparison of plastic stocks and fluxes to those of carbon reveals that the quantities of plastics present in some ecosystems rival the quantity of natural organic carbon and suggests that geochemists should now consider plastics in their analyses. Acknowledging plastics as geomaterials and adopting geochemical insights and methods can expedite our understanding of plastics in the Earth system. Plastics also can be used as global-scale tracers to advance Earth system science. 

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4. Biobased plastics with insect-repellent functionality

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5. Degradable Plastics Are Vulnerable to Cracks

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2021.02.009  

   Yang, Xuxu; Steck, Jason; Yang, Jiawei; Wang, Yecheng; Suo, Zhigang (May 2021, Engineering)

   A plastic may degrade in response to a trigger. The kinetics of degradation have long been characterized by the loss of weight and strength over time. These methods of gross characterization, however, are misleading when plastic degrades heterogeneously. Here, we study heterogeneous degradation in an extreme form: the growth of a crack under the combined action of chemistry and mechanics. An applied load opens the crack, exposes the crack front to chemical attack, and causes the crack to outrun gross degradation. We studied the crack growth in polylactic acid (PLA), a polyester in which ester bonds break by hydrolysis. We cut a crack in a PLA film using scissors, tore it using an apparatus, and recorded the crack growth using a camera through a microscope. In our testing range, the crack velocity was insensitive to load but was sensitive to humidity and pH. These findings will aid the development of degradable plastics for healthcare and sustainability. 

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